The state of the University

Sir John Daniel

Speech given April 4th 1997 at the Annual Conference of the Open University Student Association

Introduction

It is good to be with you again. The timing of the OUSA conference usually coincides with the beginning of the OU's season of degree ceremonies. We now hold over twenty degree ceremonies and, as you know, I like to officiate at as many as possible. This is partly selfishness. I simply enjoy talking individually to thousands of graduates each year and hearing their enthusiasm for the changes that the OU has made to their lives.

My presence there also signals the importance that the OU attaches to the recognition of our graduates' achievements. If you want to see what an organisation values, look at what it celebrates. The efforts that hundreds of my colleagues invest in organising degrees ceremonies that are both friendly and dignified expresses our determination to celebrate your success in style.

Some years the geography of the OUSA conference is incompatible with the geography of that weekend's degree ceremony. This year, I am delighted to say, you have organised it perfectly. Loughborough is half way to Harrogate, where we shall have the first degree ceremony tomorrow. They will finish in Paris in September.

At the OUSA conference you expect the Vice-Chancellor to give a state of the University address and to tread lightly across the burning issues. That is what I shall do. The OUSA conference is a key event not just because you are all very important people, but because major changes in student opinion often crystallise here. I remember two in particular.

Some years back my speech to this conference was sandwiched in the middle of a heated debate about the use of technology - in particular about the home computing policy. Many speakers were against it on grounds of equity. But we soon saw the tide begin to run in the other direction. From scepticism and hostility the OUSA position changed to support and enthusiasm. Today, computer networking is an OU success story and I receive touching testimonials from students about how it helps them. One wrote: "I would never come into contact with this rich tapestry of humanity by any other means". Another said: "It can change the life of a disabled student by increasing the motivation to study and giving him or her access to other students in a way never before possible".

More recently, after a ding-dong debate, OUSA changed its position on Europe. You were, at first, very sceptical about the offering of OU courses throughout the European Union. Later you embraced the idea and chose your president, Helen from among the OU students living outside the UK. I thank her for her assiduity in representing you in a great diversity of fora.

So it's good to talk to you, as you begin your conference, on the state of the Open University. As a summary, Charles Dickens' words on the first page of A Tale of Two Cities jump to mind. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times". Let's start with the worst of times.

Financial

The bad news is that the OU must adjust to a steady relative decline in the grants it receives from public funds. That causes the OU a particular problem. The problem is not that we are being squeezed more than other universities - ever since 1992 our annual percentage grant increase has been at or very near the top of the league table of a hundred universities. This put the OU on a fast growth curve, being given considerable additional funds to take extra students. In the time I have been Vice-Chancellor OU student numbers have increased by around 50,000, the equivalent of two big campus universities. We have, as a result, become much more open to people and places.

This year the Funding Council stopped that growth. When you see an obstacle in the road and hit the brakes, it jolts the passengers more if you're going fast than if you're going slowly. The OU was going fast. Hitting the brakes, when our grant for 1996/97 went down, has been a painful experience. For next year the Government has re-asserted its belief in part-time study and asked the OU to expand again. However, it has warned us that the long-term prognosis for public funds going into higher education is not good.

I don't like stop-go policies. I particularly don't like the way they oblige us to vary up and down the number of associate lecturers that we appoint to be your tutors. Nevertheless, I believe that the Open University must always respond positively when the government gives it the chance to take more students. But we must also react to variations in funding. For most of you the fees you pay do not cover the marginal cost of serving you as students, so if the grant goes down numbers must also go down in the short term.

In the longer term we shall reduce operating costs so as to narrow the gap between student fees and marginal costs. I give you the assurance that in cutting costs our guiding principle is to maintain the quality and quantity of the course materials and tutorial services that you, as students, receive from the OU. We shall make the economies in areas and systems that are less visible to you.

Compared to other universities the resources of the OU are already highly focused on our core mission of serving you. We don't have an endowment to dip into, or land to sell. We don't have a hospital or an industrial park to get rid of. Three-quarters of the OU budget goes directly on the academic functions of course production and presentation so we can't make serious economies without including those areas, even if we do concentrate on the functions behind the scenes.

Keeping perspective

We are making good progress but I fully understand that the imperative of cutting costs has created anxiety within the University. Senate is the lightning rod for those worries. Some of you heard the thunder when Senate met late last year. We are a British university, so Senate tends to adopt the adversarial style of the House of the Commons. Some months ago our Chancellor told her flock in Parliament that they were suffering from pre-election tension. Senate has been suffering from pre-budget tension in a similar way, but I hope the worst is over. Meanwhile, it adds to the challenge of being your Vice-Chancellor.

Being Vice-Chancellor is like being the drum in a washing machine. You're often in hot water, there's lots of agitation, you deal with much dirty linen, and much of the output goes down the drain before you throw in the towel. I'm not, however, asking your sympathy for the Vice-Chancellor. I am the shepherd of the flock but the Pro-Vice-Chancellors are the crooks on which I lean. They take the flak for making changes and I ask for your understanding of their difficult role. They all highly intelligent people, absolutely dedicated to the good of the OU, who work immensely hard on your behalf, usually at considerable damage to their own academic careers. They do not deserve the personal attacks directed at them by colleagues who have forgotten the conventions of participative decision-making. I'm pleased to say that it is rare for student members of Senate for indulge in personal attacks and I beg you you keep it that way. The OU is unlikely to move forward sensibly if we are at each others' throats.

That's the bad news. But I shouldn't have called it the worst of times. Let's keep some perspective. For several years the OU's School of Education has been helping in the renewal of education in Albania. Let me read to you from an e-mail received by a member of our School of Education from an Albanian colleague just before Easter:

"It is getting calmer. You may have probably heard of the destructions that have happened in our universities. As you already know we have five teacher education universities in Albania: Tirana, Elbasan, Korce, Gjirokaster, and Shkoder. There is also an agricultural university in Tirana which has been totally ruined by the bandits. All the books in the library have been burned. And the teachers and students are facing tremendous difficulties. In each university they have set up a reconstruction task force in order to restore the university. At the same time a lot of Albanians and businessmen are contributing money and other things. The former rector of the agricultural university, Professor Mentor Permeti has offered his library and ALL his savings to the University. Many people are hosting university students whose homes are in other districts. This encouraged me to do something. Hence this message.

"The same is true for the universities of Elbasan and Korce. In both of them I have worked hard setting up the media centres to support teacher education. Now they are all gone. This has aroused in me a terrible feeling. In the framework of university reconstruction I will do my best to do something. I have met some of the university staff from different universities and they feel hopeless. I have explained that we all need to get together and do our best to restore our universities.

"What I am asking you may sound foolish because things were destroyed by Albanians, but I am aware that bandits and rebels do not make up the Albanian population. There is still a BIG group that wants to move the country forward. Having said this I think it is worthwhile to encourage and support people who can make a difference for their country. I do not want them to feel alone in the middle of this catastrophe.

Lots, lots of love and good wishes. Zana."

I think you'd agree that while we may have difficulties, others have disasters to overcome.

Academic quality

Furthermore, the OU receives a steady stream of good news. It felt like the best of times in February. The Chancellor and I went with a group of students, graduates and staff to Buckingham Palace to receive from Her Majesty and the Duke of Edinburgh the Queen's Anniversary Prize for our Post-Graduate Certificate in Education Programme. It was a proud moment for me and you should feel proud too.

The decision of the Department for Education in 1991 to commission from the OU a programme for the initial training of teachers was an important step in the recognition of your University. Hitherto, the Whitehall view had been that the OU was very worthy and a splendid thing for continuing education. Entrusting the OU with the initial training of such a vital profession as teachers was an official vote of confidence that the OU had become a real university.

Now the PGCE has won the Queen's Anniversary Prize. It's the only teacher training programme ever to do so. That's a tremendous accolade to the students, graduates and staff of the programme - and to the thousands of schools where students do their teaching practice.

Better still, the Queen's Award is only one example of how the OU is winning the quality contests. You know, because some of you have been involved in them, that the Funding Council has a programme for assessing the quality of teaching in every subject. The OU has been through twelve of these assessments, and two more come up this year. So far, out of the twelve, the OU has received seven 'excellent' ratings. To have more than half your programmes rated excellent is a rare achievement.

It was put into perspective last week by the Education Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, John Clare. In an article entitled Making the grade: the best universities... and the rest, he divided Britain's universities into four divisions.

The First Division contains twenty-two universities. The OU now ranks number ten in that First Division.

Moreover, your learning has been judged excellent in Chemistry, Earth Sciences and Music. Back in the 1960s, when the OU was being planned, many people said the OU wouldn't be able to teach these subjects at all. Today the official judgement is that we teach them excellently. Indeed, there is an even more striking statistic. If you count all the students in England studying these subjects in programmes that have been rated excellent, you will find that OU students are the majority. In other words, there are more students taking excellent-rated Music courses at the OU that in all other English universities put together.

Music and Earth Sciences happen to be subjects where we've achieved the highest quality ranking in research too. That's another remarkable story. Until 1992 the OU didn't get earmarked funds for research. Now we rank in the top third of universities by research income, and we climbed up a few more places in the table this year.

You all know that OUSA represents an increasingly large body of students overseas. More than 20,000 people are now taking OU courses in other countries - the equivalent of a fair-sized university in its own right. Outside Europe we serve these OU students through partnerships. The quality of those partnerships is crucial, for you also know that some maverick British institutions have been running programmes of dubious quality abroad, thereby damaging the reputation of all UK higher education.

The quality of the OU's partnerships was reviewed last year by the Higher Education Quality Council and received a very favourable assessment. Those partnerships are not all overseas. Soon after the government asked us to undertake initial teacher training it also asked the OU to carry on the function of the Council for National Academic Awards, the CNAA. OU Validation Services is now as big as a medium-sized university. In particular, it has dramatically increased the scale and scope of our Ph.D. programme and made the OU the leading awarding university for higher level vocational qualifications. The Higher Education Quality Council gave this validation work a very clean bill of health too.

University Challenge

I must mention one other piece of good news: our stellar performance in the most recent round of University Challenge. For a week earlier this year I was congratulated everywhere I went. Of course, I can claim no credit whatsoever for the wonderful performance of the OUSA team - but I accepted the congratulations anyway on your behalf. Let's have a round of applause for our University Challenge team.

I've discovered that most of the movers and shakers in Britain watch University Challenge, so our team has actually done more to establish the OU's academic horsepower in the minds of the great and the good than the other successes I've mentioned.

So there is plenty of good news around the OU - and good news where it counts, namely in the credibility of the programmes you study and the awards you receive - and in the image of quality that OU students project. The University works constantly to make sure that credibility is widely appreciated among employers and others whose good opinion is important to OU graduates.

Some of you will know the book OU Women in which Pat Lunneborg records the stories of twenty women who did OU degrees. She's just done the same for OU Men. Reading the aspirations and experiences of this very diverse group, I was powerfully struck by the importance they all attached to the implications of OU study for their work. Which brings me to this year's burning issue, named degrees.

Named degrees

A generation ago the OU introduced an original, credit-based curriculum that encouraged students to range widely over human knowledge. Following Oxbridge practice all undergraduate study led to a BA degree. Many OU graduates, in talking about their degrees or recording them on their CVs, naturally identified the major subject they had studied. I remember, for instance, that when Pauline Clare was appointed Chief Constable of Lancashire she told the press she had an OU degree in psychology. I've been doing the same all my career. My degree certificate from Oxford just says Bachelor of Arts, but I've always presented myself as having a BA in Metallurgy. I've never had a problem and I don't imagine Pauline Clare has either.

However, crowning study in science with a Bachelor of Arts sounded odd, so it was helpful that the OU introduced the option of a BSc. More recently, at its last meeting, Senate approved the introduction of named degrees and asked that an implementation group be set up. I shall chair the group, which meets a few days time.

Here's how I intend to approach the task. My goal is that, by this time next year, tens of thousands of OU graduates will, if they so wish, be able to name their degrees by subject or subjects with the University's full approval. We now have a rich array of courses, and I should like to maximise the number of combinations that we recognise. We shall work fast but carefully to develop the list, because I want - and you must want - the OU's list of named degrees to maintain the same credibility as the rest of its academic activities.

We shall also invest careful effort in developing the documents that inform graduates, employers and other universities about these named degrees in a clear and succinct manner. In this we are helped by already having the UK's best academic transcript.